the cea forum winter/spring 2014

THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014

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Thinking/Feeling: Emotion, Spectatorship, and the Pedagogy of Horror Allison Whitney Texas Tech University

When teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their

audiences, instructors often find it challenging to find pedagogical strategies that are at once

effective and responsible. For students not accustomed to horror, the shocking nature of the texts

can sometimes be difficult to handle, while even the horror fans in one’s classroom, once

provoked by new critical approaches and theories, may find themselves newly unsettled even by

well-known texts. Since many students have been trained to regard emotional engagement and

rational thought as mutually exclusive, particularly in the context of formal education, they often

perceive the emotional impact of horror as an impediment to critical analysis. In this essay I will

offer practical strategies for helping students to identify, codify, and contemplate their emotional

relationships to horror films, and to use those insights in aid of critical, historical, and thematic

analysis, both in their written work and in classroom discussion. I will detail assignments and

class activities developed while teaching junior-level film and media studies classes on “Horror

and the Fantastic” in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, and explain how these

exercises helped students to contemplate their own experiences of spectatorship, and those of

fellow audience members, allowing them to intellectualize a given text without disregarding the

importance of feeling.


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While studies of popular culture are a well-established component of academic discourse,

it remains that courses on forms and genres with a sensational or low-brow reputation tend not to

be taken seriously, even, and sometimes especially, by the students who enroll in such courses

hoping for an “easy A.” While a class on, say, vampires, might place rigorous demands on

students, drawing upon such discourses as the study of religion, the history of medicine (from

epidemiology to psychiatry), economic and political theory, post-colonial criticism, gender and

queer theory, representations of race, and so forth, the objections that these texts are “just for

entertainment” and therefore “ruined” through sustained analysis, or that they simply do not

warrant intellectual attention, tend to persist. While every instructor in the humanities has

encountered similar challenges (“What do The Beatles have to do with me?”), the resistance is

particularly strong when dealing with a genre like horror, one that trades in the baser emotions of

fear, disgust, shock, and arousal, and which many perceive (sometimes justifiably) as

exploitative, sadistic, or motivated by prurient interest. In my teaching, I have addressed this

resistance by making these very emotional states a central focus, pointing out how they are not

only central to human experience, but also illuminating how one’s emotional engagement with a

film, both as an individual and as a member of an audience, is crucial to understanding its

rhetorical, social, political, and aesthetic properties.

At our first meeting of the semester, I ask students to brainstorm on the definition of

“horror” – what words, concepts, and expectations come to mind? As the list of associations

grows, including character types, varieties of monsters, tropes of scary music and so forth, the

students arrive at the realization that horror, more than many other genres, is built around

emotional states, specifically a combination of fear, tension, anxiety, and disgust, as well as their


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physiological correlatives of muscle tension, covering one’s eyes or ears, screams, nausea, and in

some cases, laughter. In the first assigned reading, Noël Carroll’s “The Nature of Horror”, he

explains that the horror genre, much like suspense or mystery, is named after a feeling, and that

“the genres that are named by the very affect they are designed to provoke suggest a very

tantalizing strategy through which to pursue their analysis” (Carroll 52). Indeed, since horror is

defined in terms of emotional response, it is vital that students develop a nuanced understanding

of what it means to have an emotion, the distinctions among emotions aroused by a text vs. real-

life stimuli, and the relationship of emotion to film style and film culture, including practices of

spectatorship. In order to cultivate this kind of sensitivity, I have designed an assignment that

incorporates the traditional critical strategy of narrative segmentation, with an additional

codification and analysis of viewer emotional states. For their first written assignment, students

were asked to perform a segmentation of a film, in this case, Night of the Living Dead (George

Romero, 1968), and to document and characterize their emotional reactions to each scene and

sequence, including both physical and psychological responses (Appendix A).

While this exercise would be productive with any film, I chose Night of the Living Dead

for several practical reasons. Since the film is in the public domain, it is very easy for students to

access it online and in other media, thus avoiding the contingencies of there being too few library

or rental copies, and the instability of commercial streaming systems where films appear and

disappear without warning. Further, later in the semester, students were assigned Kevin

Heffernan’s article “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living

Dead (1968).” Since much of this essay addresses contexts of exhibition and the film’s reception


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by urban audiences, particularly African-American viewers, it is useful for students to have

already thought about it in some detail, and to have contemplated their own responses to the film.

The assignment is organized in three stages. First, students create a narrative

segmentation of the film, identifying how it is organized as a series of sequences and scenes, in

some ways analogous to the chapters of a book (for an example, please see Appendix B). This

kind of segmentation exercise is a standard practice in film analysis, used to map out the spatial,

temporal, narrative, and formal organization of the film before proceeding to further critical

analysis. Students are asked to describe the segmentation on a chart, but in addition to listing

narrative events, they also note the emotional states of the characters in each scene. This part of

the segmentation anticipates a later discussion of how character emotions might cue audience

response.

In the second stage, students add a series of columns to the segmentation, but these are

dedicated to their own emotional responses. I encourage students to make note of these as they

watch the film for the first time, and then go back to define them more precisely. Students use

the taxonomy of viewer emotions described in Carl Plantinga’s Moving Viewers: American Film

and the Spectator’s Experience, where he provides a matrix of emotions specific to the

circumstances of film spectatorship, distinguishing among responses to narrative events,

character predicaments, the film as an artifact, and even to one’s own moments of self-reflection

(69). I ask students to focus on six of Plantinga’s categories: global, direct, local,

sympathetic/antipathetic, artifact and meta-emotions. Global emotions are those that span all or

much of a film’s duration, such as anticipation or suspense (69). Direct emotions concern

narrative events and the unfolding of the story, such as curiosity about what will happen, or


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confusion after an unexpected turn of events. Local emotions are quite brief, such as being

startled at a “jump scare” or surprised at a loud noise. Sympathetic (or antipathetic) emotions

take as their object the condition of characters, such as worrying about a character in danger, or

feeling disdain for a villain (72). Meta-emotions are responses either to one’s own emotions, or

to those of fellow audience members, such as feeling guilty for having misjudged a character, or

proud that you anticipated a plot twist, or shocked when someone laughs at a moment you deem

inappropriate (73). Finally, artifact emotions are responses to “the film as a constructed artifact”

– these emotions are not preoccupied with elements of the fiction, but rather, the film as a

product of creative activity (69). For example, one might feel admiration for the

cinematographer’s innovative camera movement, or anger toward the screenwriter for resorting

to a cliché. Students are reminded that as they record their emotional responses to each scene,

many of which occur simultaneously, these might include psychological states and physical

reactions, as well as more abstract thought processes.

In the third stage of the assignment, students are asked to develop an argument about the

film’s emotional structure – when and how it elicits emotional states, how these relate to the

film’s narrative and formal properties, and how these factors might inform one’s reading of the

film. While developing their arguments, I encourage students to ask themselves questions like:

How does your emotional experience influence interpretation? Were you surprised at any of your

reactions? What is the relationship between the characters’ emotions and the viewer’s? This last

question draws upon their notes from the initial segmentation, where they observed characters’

emotional states. The relationship between character and viewer emotion is particularly

significant in the horror genre, for as Carroll explains, our attitude to elements of the text is


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usually cued by characters’ responses, and these responses are essential in determining the text’s

status as horror. For example, Carroll compares character responses to a werewolf in The

Howling (Joe Dante, 1981), to Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) characters’ reactions to

Chewbacca. While Chewbacca shares many physical properties with a werewolf, people in The

Howling recoil in terror, while in Star Wars, Chewbacca is just “one of the guys” (Carroll 52). I

ask students to consider if and how characters in Night of the Living Dead provide viewers with

emotional models for their own attitudes toward both the monstrosity of the living dead, and the

actions and attitudes of the (still-breathing) characters.

Not only does this assignment allow students to better appreciate films’ narrative and

formal structures, seeing exactly how filmmakers solicit emotional states to build suspense,

encourage character identification, or produce reactions of shock or disgust, but also, by using

the framework of the assignment, students are better able to identify their feelings about the rest

of the course material and make use of those feelings in a critical capacity. For example, at a

given moment a viewer might experience multiple conflicting emotions: a sympathetic emotion

of fear (feeling afraid for a character), a local emotion of disgust (at a gory image), and also an

artifact emotion of admiration (for the creativity of the makeup artist). Such a combination of

feelings is at once powerful and confusing, but using Plantinga’s categories allows students to

make sense of their reactions, and apply this understanding to other themes and issues in the

course.

Once students are equipped with an effective vocabulary to describe emotional states,

they are able to pursue increasingly complex discussions about the implications of their own

spectatorship. Students were able to document their emotional and intellectual responses through


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another teaching strategy, where I asked students to use their mobile devices to provide live

commentary on Twitter during class screenings. Early in the semester I advise students about our

use of Twitter – recommending, for example, that they set up an academic account separate from

their personal one – and before each screening I create a unique hashtag to organize their

comments.1 As students share their responses to the film, I encourage them to keep Plantinga’s

taxonomy in mind, noting, for example, when they thought the lighting was intriguing (artifact

emotion) or were suspicious of a character (antipathetic), and so forth. In the economical verbal

system of Twitter, the categories help students to clarify their responses on the fly. For example,

a comment like “creepy!” could be specified as a long-lasting global emotion, a sudden local

emotion, a meta-emotion about a classmate’s response, or an artifact emotion praising an actor’s

performance. While there is a danger that using Twitter during screenings might introduce

unnecessary distractions, it does allow students to be aware of one another’s reactions, and, more

important, the reasons for them. For example, in addition to the verbal and physical cues one

would normally get from fellow audience members, such as gasping, starting, shifting in one’s

seat, or laughing, students are able to express the underlying motivations for those reactions.

During the screening of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) I

noticed that many students were shifting in their seats, but the Twitter feed clarified the multiple

causes of that behavior, including boredom, direct and/or sympathetic emotions of suspense and

fear, and the sometimes dizzying hand-held camera movement. This distinction became

invaluable in the ensuing class discussion of the film’s strategic uses of boredom, frustration, and

physical disorientation.


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Of all the categories in Plantinga’s system, students find artifact and meta-emotions the

most difficult to grasp, so it is especially important to review these concepts in some detail. In

preparation for the assignment, students performed an in-class segmentation and emotional

analysis of Lois Weber’s Suspense, a home invasion drama from 1913 (Appendix B). Only ten

minutes in length, the film is easy to segment in a short period of time, but more important,

Suspense not only provides historical perspective on suspense cinema, but its self-awareness

about the conventions of what had, even at this early date, become an established genre, make it

especially effective for reinforcing the concepts of artifact and meta-emotions. First, Suspense

uses creative formal strategies, including an elaborate tripartite split-screen composition for

representing telephone calls, unusual camera angles such as a bird’s-eye-view shot of the prowler

approaching the house, and interesting camera movement, such as the high-speed car chase

where one car appears in the other’s rear-view mirror. Instances like these inspire artifact

emotions of respect for the filmmakers’ creativity – emotions that students can readily recognize.

At the same time, film self-consciously employs predictable plot devices, such as the prowler

finding a key under the doormat, in a way that inspires an artifact emotion of detached

amusement that is subsequently reinforced by the film’s alternation between horror and humor.

The moments of humor in Suspense also provide a good opportunity to discuss meta-

emotion. For example, students tend to laugh when the prowler stops to eat a sandwich in the

kitchen, or during the slapstick interlude where a man is run over during the car chase. These

incidents demonstrate how laughter can function as a means of releasing tension, but also as an

opportunity for camaraderie with fellow audience members. While an individual might find a

scene funny, there is often a communal element to horror humor, particularly when audiences


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laugh simultaneously in the aftermath of a scare. Such responses have meta-emotional

components, in that one laughs at oneself for “allowing” the film to generate local emotions of

shock and startle, while that laughter is often sustained through contagion, to the point where it is

sometimes difficult to resist joining in with an enthusiastic audience. Our discussion of Suspense,

and subsequent discussions of humor and other meta-emotional states, allow students to become

more sensitive to the ways horror films encourage viewers to think about their feelings, while

also increasing their awareness of how social context informs spectatorship. Once students

become conscious of this social component of meta-emotion, they are better able to appreciate

how the public exhibition of a film might have social and political implications beyond “mere

entertainment.” For example, when we began to discuss feminist readings of slasher films, such

as Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, students

were primed to think about the implications of an audience cheering for a female hero, even as

they take pleasure in another woman’s bloody demise.2

The concepts of artifact and meta-emotion are particularly useful in countering students’

concerns that focused analysis, or learning about the technical, industrial, or historical production

of a text, will “ruin” the experience of film viewing. While it is true that in some cases, academic

study makes it more difficult to take unadulterated pleasure in a text that contains previously

undetected problematic messages, or has a troubling historical provenance, instructors work to

persuade students that education illuminates rather than destroys the object of study. One of the

apparent conflicts for students comes from their having internalized the conventions of classical

cinema, which perpetuate a powerful myth that formal elements must become invisible to the

viewer and subordinated to goals of narrative and character development. Cultural myths of


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spectatorship where one is “absorbed” into the film, or “forgets” that it’s only a movie, are a

powerful component of how many students typify the experience of cinema, and one that is

rarely examined until they take a film studies course. However, once students are able to detect

the importance of artifact and meta-emotions, they can better understand how awareness of the

film as the product of a creative process, and of their own activities as spectators, need not ruin

the experience, but rather, are essential to it. For example, in their Twitter feed on Candyman

(Bernard Rose, 1992), several students noted an artifact emotion of admiration for Tony Todd’s

performance as Candyman, and specifically the ways his acting style resonated with other horror

film stars, particularly Bela Lugosi in Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and Boris Karloff in

Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). During our classroom discussion, I was able to use this

observation to demonstrate how genre spectatorship depends on consciousness of extra-textual

references, and in this case, how viewing Candyman in the context of a larger tradition of actor

performance of monstrosity and otherness might help us to better appreciate the film’s

commentary on race and gender.

Students also began to discern how different types of emotion map onto one another,

such that the apparent distancing of artifact and meta-emotions might accentuate rather than

diminish one’s engagement with the fictional scenario. For example, one student observed that

while he was viewing Night of the Living Dead, he was absent-mindedly chewing a piece of

gum. To his surprise, he became acutely self-conscious about his chewing while watching scenes

of cannibalism, and this sudden awareness of his own body, rather than pulling him away from

the fiction, made his local and direct emotions of disgust all the more powerful. Meanwhile,

when we discussed The Blair Witch Project, students were able to identify how the film’s


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lengthy sequences of objectively boring action (or inaction), mundane, redundant, and tiresome

dialogue, and consistently unsteady and confusing camera movement encourage a level of

antipathy for the main characters, and that this antipathy was mapped onto negative artifact

emotions toward the directors Myrick and Sanchez, given that the formal strategies they employ

consistently frustrate, annoy, and even nauseate the viewer. These practices irritate the audience

in a manner that not only builds tension for the scary sequences, but also draws their attention to

their own role as spectators, and thus generates a number of meta-emotions about their own

complicity in the violations and violence they watch in the film. In this case, students discover

that their steady stream of artifact and meta-emotions, rather than detracting from their

engagement with the fiction, are quite integral to it, and are inextricable both from the film’s

potential critique of documentary practice, and its capacity to produce global, direct, and local

emotions of shock and fear.

While these exercises focus on students’ individual and collective emotional states in the

here and now, they also open up opportunities to talk about spectatorship in its historical context.

First, in preparation for the assignment, I was careful to contextualize Night of the Living Dead

in the political climate of late 1960s America, particularly regarding Cold War anxieties, anti-

war activism, the women’s movement, and the Civil Rights movement. For example, students

are generally unaware that in 1968, it was truly exceptional to have an African-American actor

portray the hero in a film, especially one with an otherwise white cast. Black and white

audiences alike were unaccustomed to identifying and sympathizing with black characters, and

this dynamic was crucial in the reception of Duane Jones’ performance as Ben, and to the film’s

political commentary. Of course, instructors typically provide historical context for any of the


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texts they include in their syllabi, but in this case, my agenda was to give students clues as to

how and why audiences might have reacted to the film, and how such reactions might have

larger social and political implications.3

Of course, asking students to speculate about how a historical audience might have

responded to a given film is potentially problematic, for in the absence of documentation,

students might resort to stereotypes and received ideas about the past. However, with this point

of caution in mind, I was able to ask students to compare their responses to films from different

historical periods as a means of demonstrating how audience expectations change over time. For

example, when it comes to gender relations, Suspense provides useful contrasts with Night of the

Living Dead, particularly when we consider students’ sympathetic and antipathetic feelings

toward the main female characters. In the case of Suspense, the besieged woman portrayed by

Lois Weber – a mother with an infant, no less – provokes consistently sympathetic emotions.

Students were afraid for her safety, and felt a combination of worry and pity for her, given her

obvious vulnerability, anxiety, fear, and concern for her child. While they found her fainting

spell at the end of the film melodramatic, and even darkly humorous, they felt it was consistent

with the 1913 context of the film. Meanwhile, in Night of the Living Dead, many students

remarked on how their sympathetic feelings for Barbra (Judith O’Dea) shifted dramatically

toward antipathy over the course of the film. In the opening sequence in the graveyard, students

feel sorry for Barbra as her brother teases her, and this sympathy turns to a more serious concern

as she witnesses her brother’s death at the hands (and teeth) of the living dead. However, once

she flees to a nearby house, where she meets Ben and the other characters, she begins to shut

down emotionally, becoming catatonic and ineffectual. While her character is clearly suffering


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from personal and existential trauma, students note that they start to find Barbra increasingly

annoying, to the point where her final demise is not only expected, but a source of satisfaction.

On a certain level, Suspense and Night of the Living Dead have similar spatial and conceptual

structures, where an invading and malevolent force threatens a domestic space, a space that

represents both family structures and the larger social order. In both cases, the main female

character collapses from fear, but in Barbra’s case, this behavior inspires irritation rather than

sympathy. While I do point out that Weber’s performance of helplessness in Suspense is self-

consciously overwrought, students soon realize that by 1968, second-wave feminism had begun

to create an expectation of self-reliance for female characters. Therefore, rather than

sympathizing with Barbra as a damsel in distress, we expect her to embrace her agency, and find

it frustrating when she fails to do so.

The critical framework of emotional analysis allows students to unpack their reasons for

liking, disliking, or feeling conflicted about a given film, and also to better understand and

respect the divergent opinions of their classmates. In many instances, I found that discerning

emotional structures, and being able to categorize one’s feelings, was particularly helpful to

students who do not typically enjoy horror, or even horror enthusiasts as they struggle with the

more disturbing elements of a given text. Since no emotion is more “correct” than another,

students were able to validate and explicate their experiences, and then use those explications in

critical discussions whose intellectual value beyond the context of the course became quickly

apparent – once you realize that thinking and feeling are not so far apart, the traditional

hierarchies of intellect and affect come into question. In an educational environment that often

dichotomizes thinking and feeling, I have found that these exercises help students become


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attuned to the rhetorical uses of emotion, the function of emotion in both individual and

communal experience, the way feelings can manifest in public space, and the potential social and

political implications of one’s sympathies. The necessarily extreme feelings aroused by horror

texts provide ample material for students to learn new ways of thinking about feeling, which in

turn allows them to discover the value of horror.


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Appendix A: Assignment Instructions

First Assignment – Segmentation and Emotional Analysis

ENG 3388: Horror and the Fantastic

Much in the way that a novel is usually divided into chapters, films are generally organized as a

series of narrative segments. In order to analyze a film, it is important to document and

understand this structural organization. A segmentation provides a scene-by-scene outline of the

film, noting its major narrative events. A scene is a narrative unit, usually bounded by space,

time and action, and we can say that a scene begins and ends when there is a significant change

in one or all of these components.

For this assignment, you will perform a segmentation of George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the

Living Dead. (Note that this film has been re-made in various forms. You may not do your

assignment on a remake. You must use the original 1968 film.)

Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain. Therefore, it is available for free (legally)

online and it is easy to find inexpensive DVD copies. There are also links on the class website.

This assignment has three stages, and you should do them in order:


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The first stage of this assignment is to distinguish the major narrative units of the film – a

breakdown of the scenes. (See the model for Suspense). In your description of narrative events,

you should mention the emotional states represented in the film, i.e. the emotions of the

characters.

The second stage of the assignment is to document the various emotional responses felt by the

viewer. I recommend that you watch the film all the way through and make note of your

reactions, then go through it more slowly in order to clarify and distinguish the emotions. You

must utilize Carl Plantinga’s chart of “Types of Spectator Emotions” from page 69 to categorize

these various emotional responses. You should devote particular attention to the following

emotion types: Direct, Local, Sympathetic/Antipathetic, Meta-emotions, and Artifact. You may

address Global emotions in your discussion, but given their generalized nature, it is not necessary

to document them throughout. Your descriptions of emotions may include physical responses as

well as more abstract concepts.

The third stage is your analysis of the film’s narrative and emotional structure. When I say

“analysis,” this means that you develop an argument drawing upon both your subjective

impressions of the film and the material that you have documented. In your analysis, you should

comment on how the film structures the viewer’s perceptions and emotional responses, and how

this contributes to the film’s overall meaning. How does the emotional experience influence

interpretation? What is the relationship between the characters’ emotions and the viewer’s? Keep

in mind both Carroll and Plantinga’s arguments about emotion. Your analysis must make direct


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reference to your segmentation, e.g. “If we compare scene III part b with scene VII part d, we

can see how the repetition of a location but with radically different narrative actions provokes an

artifact emotion in the viewer…” This analysis should be three (3) pages in length. Since it is

brief, avoid lengthy introductions, plot summaries, or commentary not relevant to the

assignment.

A word to the wise: This is a time-consuming assignment, so you must begin as soon as possible.

If you start now, you will not only have time to complete it, but you will also have time to

approach me for help and/or take your draft to the Writing Center.

Note the following:

• Refer to events in films in the present tense. For example: “the young couple visits a

graveyard”, or “the thunder and lighting create a scary mood”.

• Film titles should be in italics, not in “quotation marks.”

• A scene is NOT the same thing as a shot. A shot is a single uninterrupted series of

frames, and it can be of any duration. A scene is a narrative unit. A scene can consist of a

single shot, but that is unusual in mainstream cinema. Avoid the term “camera shot” –

shot is sufficient.

• While a scene possesses unity of space, time, and action, within a single scene there can

be a flashback to another space and time (say, inside the character’s mind), or there can

be a representation of a distant space, such as a television image. For our purposes, these

moments are still considered part of the scene because it is consistent with its action (i.e.


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the character’s remembering is part of the action of the scene, or the act of watching

television is part of the scene).

• Cross-cutting: It is common in cinema to cut back and forth between two spaces to

represent simultaneous activities. We can consider these to be part of the same scene.

• In the film you’re going to analyze, the bulk of the action occurs in and around the house

where the people are trying to defend themselves against the living dead. Given that the

location is fairly consistent, you may find it difficult to decide where scenes begin and

end. However, note that there are distinct locations in the house such as the living room

and basement. Also, at various points people do have conversations on different themes,

and different characters enter and leave the scene. Therefore, the transition from one

scene to the next might have more to do with a thematic shift, or a change in characters.

• Night of the Living Dead is an extremely influential film. Therefore, if you have seen a

horror film made since 1968, you have probably seen references to it that will influence

your reactions. Therefore, it is fair for you to speculate about audience reactions in the

1968 context, but you may also talk about your reaction as a 21st century viewer.


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Appendix B: Segmentation and Emotional Analysis of Suspense (Lois

Weber, 1913)

Narrative Segmentation Emotional Responses

I. Maid’s Departure

a) Maid sets suitcase and hat

on kitchen table, listens at

door, peers through keyhole

b) Wife and baby in living

room

c) Maid leaves note saying

she’s leaving, locks front

door

Direct: curiosity, anticipation

Sympathetic: concern for the wife/baby

Antipathetic: judgment of maid as

irresponsible, cowardly

Artifact: amusement at keyhole shot,

recognition of obvious plot device of key

under doormat

II. Outdoor scene, tramp enters

shot

a) Maid leaves the scene, tramp re-

traces her steps

Direct: anticipation, curiosity about tramp

Sympathetic: concern for wife/baby

III. Telephone call – screen split Direct: unnerved by tramp’s behavior


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three ways, husband annoyed

he’ll be home late, wife smiles,

says she’s ok. Tramp listens at

window.

Sympathetic: concern for wife because of

tramp’s suspicious expression and

husband’s late return

Artifact: interest in three-way division of

screen

IV. Home alone

a) Wife finds note. Looks

worried.

She declines to call husband, or retrieve

key. She secures windows and doors.

b) Tramp appears at window while wife

picks up baby

Direct: worry, increasing suspense,

directing attention to layout of house

Sympathetic: worried for wife

Antipathetic: antipathy toward tramp, who

is now a peeping tom. Frustration with

wife for not retrieving key from under

doormat, and not calling husband.

V. Tramp prowling

a) Tramp creeps around house,

approaches doormat and

looks up to window

b) Wife sees him from

bedroom

Local: startle from tramp’s direct gaze

Sympathetic: concern for wife’s panic

Artifact: impressed with creative camera

angle directly above tramp, plus his

looking directly at camera

VI. Second Telephone call – three-

way split screen

Direct: urgency

Sympathetic: worry for both wife and


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a) Tramp finds key under mat and

enters house

b) Wife reports that tramp is entering

kitchen

c) Husband’s expression changes from

smiling to shock

d) Tramp cuts telephone cord

e) Husband runs out of his office

husband

Artifact: confused by level of activity in all

three parts of the screen

VII. Car Chase

a) husband jumps in car idling outside

building and drives off

b) car’s owner informs police, who

give chase

c) wife clutches telephone

d) tramp walks idly through kitchen,

eats a sandwich

e) cars race around corners

f) wife barricades self in bedroom

g) humorous moment where man is

run over but unhurt

Direct: excitement, suspense, laughter at

tramp eating sandwich, worry

Artifact: noting the combination of humor

(tramp eating/man run over) with fear

(tramp picks up knife). Admiration of

clever rear-view mirror shot.

Meta-emotion: pleasure in laughing with an

audience

VIII. Chase intensifies Direct: Increasing suspense


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a) the cars get faster and closer

b) tramp moves further into the house,

starts to climb stairs, approaches

camera with very menacing

expression

c) wife screams and clutches baby

Sympathetic: concern that husband will be

stopped by pursuers. Meanwhile,

understanding that the pursuers think they

are in the right.

Also, sympathy for wife’s increasing fear,

worry for baby’s safety

IX. Entering Bedroom/Foot chase

a) tramp’s arm breaks through

bedroom door, unlocks it, pushes

barricade away

b) close-up of mother screaming

c) husband jumps from moving car

and runs toward house

Direct: increasing suspense, anxiety

Sympathetic: fear for wife, concern that

husband won’t make it in time

Artifact: admiration for filmmakers’

decision to have husband leap from the car

rather than stopping it

X. Rescue

a) tramp enters bedroom, wife screams

b) police arrive at abandoned car and

run toward house, firing guns

c) tramp stops when he hears guns,

runs down stairs

d) husband bursts in and struggles

Direct: anxiety, excitement, relief

Sympathetic: worry that police will shoot

husband, fear for wife, admiration of

husband for successful rescue

Antipathetic: disdain for tramp for

terrorizing the wife, and for his cowardice

at sound of gunfire.


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with tramp

e) police apprehend tramp

Artifact: Appreciation of the use of gunfire

– clever plot device.

XI. Bedroom finale

a) Husband enters bedroom, where

wife and baby are collapsed on bed

b) husband picks up baby, and

explains to pursuers that he stole

the car to rescue his family.

Embraces wife.

c) Pursuer pats husband on back,

leaves frame with police officer

Direct: relief, humor

Sympathetic: concern for wife, relief with

husband

Artifact: Again, noting use of humor in

husband/pursuer interaction. Wondering

why the wife doesn’t sit up.


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Notes

1 Thanks to Andrea Wood for sharing her strategies in using Twitter during screenings, and then

employing students’ comments as a foundation for further class discussion.

2 There are multiple audio and video recordings of audience reactions to horror films available

online that one can use to illustrate spectator behavior. These include both personal recordings

made by filmgoers, and promotional materials, such as the many trailers for the Paranormal

Activity films that use night-vision footage of screaming audiences. For example, “Paranormal

Activity - Sherry Lansing Theatre Reactions” shows a variety of audience reactions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LfV7SGA-2o, while a 1979 audio recording of an audience

watching John Carpenter’s Halloween was synched with video from the appropriate sequence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ1M3P1isHA.

3 I have used excerpts from the documentary The American Nightmare (Adam Simon, 2000),

which examines the history of American horror cinema, to contextualize the reception of Night

of the Living Dead, specifically director Jon Landis’ account of his surprise at seeing a black

hero in a film, film scholar Adam Lowenstein’s explication of the correspondences between the

film and lynching imagery, and George Romero’s account of hearing about the assassination of

Martin Luther King shortly after completing the film, and how this event would invariably

inform audiences’ reading of Ben’s murder at the end of the film.


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Works Cited

Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46.1 (1987):

51-59.

Clover, Carol. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP,

1993.

Heffernan, Kevin. “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living

Dead (1968).” Cinema Journal 41.3 (2002): 59-77.

Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. University of

California Press, 2009.

the cea forum winter/spring 2014

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